2020_Tanishqa Rodrigues

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Spatiality of remembrance: encounters between the native and urban

Memory and Belonging
Tanishqa Rodrigues, 2020

Ancestral homes and native places are an archive of stories, memories, traditions, rituals, histories and experiences. Each person inhabiting it has her own story which on telling makes it so real because of the emotion and nostalgia attached. Over the years people have become more mobile. They have started moving to urban environments and creating their homes without the basis of land, territory, property or community. There is a subconscious effort to reproduce the practices and rituals from the native in newer homes. The need to do so comes from memories that are invoked because of nostalgia. The planned urban spaces are often not able to house such practices and hence there is a negotiation of space at the places of these encounters, causing inhibition and selfing of places to be appropriated in certain ways.

The concepts I was working with were remembrance, belonging and place making. I started by understanding the difference between space, place, object and image and their role in memory. The different types of memory and the systems in which they are remembered. Referring to the works of Kelly Baker, Peter Geschiere and Arjun Appadurai, I studied the part identity, belonging, emotion and physical environment play in place attachment. And how the practices and experiences of the native help in shaping oneself and space. I referred to Bachelard and Proust to analyze what it meant to ‘belong’ and to ‘be rooted’. How space is produced through memories and imaginations and how they then get translated into urban geographies.

For my field study I had conversations with three people from the same family about their ancestral homes and the native places. I made memory maps of how they remembered, these were then translated into narrative drawings of how I imagined the space. These are drawn across different timelines and comprise various experiences, stories, practices and objects of the native. Each drawing is also accompanied by a short story that talks about the same. For the method of drawing I referred to the works of Nilima Sheikh, Pieter Bruegel and Miniature Paintings.

Memories get triggered by basic senses like touch and taste. Connections between the past and the present can be made through recognition of familiar shapes, smells, textures. Native memories often consist of symbolic objects of the past and their influence helps create associations and build an identity. The space planned in the native is based on how one lives and the practices. In the urban setting the lived maybe different from the planned space.

The focus of this study is to understand how the memory or imagined space of the native home becomes instrumental in the way we think about and perceive space. And how does remembered space encounter the new inhabited space. This thesis becomes important in understanding and rethinking the requirements and form of the planned, urban, domestic households.

Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:

Spatialities of everyday heritage

Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijaykar, 2020

Galalelya jaga ("गाळलेल्या जागा"): overlaps of memory and home

Memory and Belonging
Aditi Bhandari, 2024

Remembering ghar: continuities of memory

Memory and Belonging
Anika Pugalia, 2024

Architecture of a monument: Vasai fort

Memory and Belonging
Chinmay Kadwadkar, 2018

Architecture and memory: remembering home in involuntary dislocation

Memory and Belonging
Dhruv Chavan, 2018

On Sindhi refugees: making home in Jalgaon

Memory and Belonging
Khushboo Tejwani, 2024

Retrofitted domesticities

Memory and Belonging
Nikunj Dedhia, 2020

Architecture and healing: civil war inversion of public space Borella, Colombo

Memory and Belonging
Rutu Kelekar, 2018

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